Yahoo News 'There's all that speculation about who'll cop for nul points - why I'll be glued to Eurovision 2024 final'
Love it or hate it, the Eurovision Song Contest is back for 2024.
Being firmly in the first of those two camps, I’ve already been stationed in front of the box for the semi-finals that were staged earlier this week to identify the entries joining the Big Five in the final, which hits our screens on Saturday, May 11. It was an uplifting, sometimes eyebrow-raising first taste over those two evenings of the musical extravaganza that’s to come.
On Saturday night, I will be trying very hard not to move (loo breaks or a quick top-up of my wine glass notwithstanding) until the closing credits have rolled to their last. Yes, I will possibly be yawning by that time, but only out of tiredness, not boredom.
READ MORE:
I don’t know when it first became a “thing” with me that, unless I’m in some far-flung part of the world without access to a TV, or at a wedding or some-such important event, I must be there to witness the show, from start to finish. It causes some disgruntlement with my other half, who’s not a fan, but he is gracious enough about me viewing on our big telly.
Normally I’d take myself off to the spare room, where I choose to watch crafting or cooking shows and those really early, schmaltzy Christmas films that start airing from about late September. Eurovision night, however, is a different matter.
If we’re fed and watered by the time the opening fanfare of The Prelude to Charpentier's Te Deum, which has been the signature tune for Eurovision for over 60 years, is playing, all the better. It’ll be time to settle down and watch the sometimes weird, sometimes wonderful unfold in Malmö, Sweden.
I find it such fun seeing all the costumes, let alone listening to the songs. They get more bizarre and more daring by the year and we even got a warning about two of the acts – Slovenia’s Raiven and Finland’s Windows95man – during the first semi-final that we might get sight of more than we bargained for.
Even model and agony aunt Katie Boyle who, legend has it, had to be cut out of her underwear and go commando beneath her satin dress before hosting the song contest in 1974, would have blanched at some of today’s sights. Disastrous dressing aside, some of the performances can be highly questionable too, in my opinion, but that just adds to the spectacle and speculation about who’ll cop for the nul points result.
I do still miss Terry Wogan’s acerbic voiceovers about all things Eurovision but Graham Norton is as good a contender with his critique of the show. I hope he will again encourage viewers to raise a glass in memory of Sir Terry during song nine of the final, as was the former host’s tradition – mine might even be a glass of Bailey’s, just like Sir Terry’s tipple.
I can get as rattled as the next person about the way the voting can go - and not only on behalf of the UK, which has generally suffered for more years than I care to count at the hands of the European jurors - but for any country I think has performed a damned good song. Sam Ryder, representing us brilliantly with Space Man in 2022, knocked all that “oh, it’s political” twaddle out the window, anyway.
I’m hopeful for Olly Alexander’s UK entry this year but I don’t know if I see it as the winner of this 68th Eurovision Song Contest, regardless of the fact I am constantly humming Dizzy to myself. But I could be wrong.
